Unveiled by Welsh National Opera last autumn, this Carmen is now in its first revival. Original director Jo Davies has abandoned picture postcard Spain and sun-drenched vistas for images of grey, urban squalor somewhere in modern-day Latin America.
Lise Davidsen ‘rescues’ Tobias Kratzer’s Fidelio at the Royal Opera House
Making Fidelio – Beethoven’s paean to liberty, constancy and fidelity – an emblem of the republican spirit of the French Revolution is unproblematic, despite the opera’s censor-driven ‘Spanish’ setting.
A sunny, insouciant CosÏ from English Touring Opera
Beach balls and parasols. Strolls along the strand. Cocktails on the terrace. Laura Attridge’s new production of CosÏ fan tutte which opened English Touring Opera’s 2020 spring tour at the Hackney Empire, is a sunny, insouciant and often downright silly affair.
A wonderful role debut for Natalya Romaniw in ENO’s revival of Minghella’s Madama Butterfly
The visual beauty of Anthony Minghella’s 2005 production of Madama Butterfly, now returning to the Coliseum stage for its seventh revival, still takes one’s breath away.
Charlie Parker’s Yardbird at Seattle
It appears that Charlie Parker’s Yardbird has reached the end of its road in Seattle. Since it opened in 2015 at Opera Philadelphia it has played Arizona, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and the English National Opera.
La PÈrichole in Marseille
The most notable of all PÈricholes of Offenbach’s sentimental operetta is surely the legendary Hortense Schneider who created the role back in 1868 at Paris’ ThÈ‚tre des VarietÈs. Alas there is no digital record.
Three Centuries Collide: Widmann, Ravel and Beethoven
It’s very rare that you go to a concert and your expectation of it is completely turned on its head. This was one of those. Three works, each composed exactly a century apart, beginning and ending with performances of such clarity and brilliance.
Seventeenth-century rhetoric from The Sixteen at Wigmore Hall
‘Yes, in my opinion no rhetoric more persuadeth or hath greater power over the mind; hath not Musicke her figures, the same which Rhetorique? What is a
Hr?öa’s Mahler: A Resurrection from the Golden Age
Jakub Hr?öa has an unusual gift for a conductor and that is to make the mightiest symphony sound uncommonly intimate. There were many moments during this performance of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony where he grappled with its monumental scale while reducing sections of it to chamber music; times when the power of his vision might crack the heavens apart and times when a velvet glove imposed the solitude of prayer.
Full-Throated Troubador Serenades San JosÈ
Verdi’s sublimely memorable melodies inform and redeem his setting of the dramatically muddled Il Trovatore, the most challenging piece to stage of his middle-period successes.